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E-mail from the UK tells me that Coraline is the number one children's bestseller in Ireland. Hurrah!

Feeling better and worse than I did yesterday -- would really like a day in bed to cough and sleep. Unfortunately that's not an option, so I shall swallow my antibiotics and refrain from operating heavy machinery.

Maddy had a wonderful birthday, if the balloon debris is anything to go by.

Lots of messages along the lines of Will you be at ConJos� for any more on Sunday than just the Hugo Awards ceremony? and to all of them I'm afraid the answer's no. I've just got back from the (fairly gruelling) UK-and-Ireland tour and really don't want to have to sign, do panels, all the Worldcon stuff, which is why I'm not going to the con (despite having signed up as a presupporting member in New Zealand some time in the last century). I was proud of myself for arranging the world in such a way that I do get to be there on Sunday night, which is more than I managed when Dream Hunters was nominated for a Hugo.

It'll be my first Hugo ceremony. The last time I went to a Worldcon (Brighton, England, in 1987), I didn't want to miss anything, so didn't bother with things like sleeping for the first four days of the con. By early Sunday evening I was very asleep, and I missed the Hugos and even missed the fireworks that marked the closing ceremonies, although I have some very vivid dreams about being in the trenches in World War One, and woke up to the sound of last of the firework explosions on the beach....

....

From the Scottish Sunday Herald, we learn that Other celeb authors floating around the capital included Tutti-Frutti writer John Byrne; the brilliant kids author Anne Fine; cult fiction king Neil Gaiman; Pete McCarthy, who writes a lot about being Pete McCarthy; the acclaimed, brooding and inspired playwright Harold Pinter; the female eunuch herself Germaine Greer; history-fella David Starkey; Scotland's psycho-writer-in-chief Iain Banks; Terry Pratchett who writes about pretend places and Liverpudlian wide-o Willy Russell. And I read that several times in my do-not-operate-heavy-machinery state before realising that he wasn't saying that Terry had written books about Willy Russell. A good place to put a comma...

But even that's not as good as the misquote from me in the Book Festival newspaper where I apparently say that "if you don't read Harry Potter books you'll wind up in the attic sacrificing kittens to Satan at midnight". Which is odd, as I thought I'd said, in response to a question about fantasy and reality, "It's not as if kids read Harry Potter books then wind up in an attic sacrificing kittens to Satan at midnight" which is not the same thing at all, really.